Browser as a weapon in a guerilla war

I’ve been playing with Chrome browser extensions this week. My latest creation is an inflation ready-reckoner.

It puts a button in your toolbar, click the button and it finds all the pound currency amounts on the page you’re viewing, adding a small button to each of them that pops up a table so that you can deflate or inflate the figure appropriately back to 2001.

Here it is, in action, on the Guardian site:

You can install it from here: Inflation ready-reckoner. It’s free.

Now for the science…

We’re used to thinking of articles and stories being published, fixed, unmalleable. Hyperlinks can of course give some context, a hidden layer behind the narrative, giving some contextualisation. But the text remains fixed.

It feels subversive, fun and useful to dick around with the text using browser extensions. Convert the currencies into more useful ones, insert references that didn’t exist, give context and understanding that the author didn’t intend.

Provide a different code-mediated reading.

It’s a bit like augmented reality, a layer inserted between what leaves the server and what hits your brain.

And, it’s necessarily a political act too – names matter. What happens if I change every occurence, in every article, of “George Osborne” to “George Osborne (18th Baronet of Ballintaylor)”. Or “UK citizen” to “UK subject”. Or “Mumbai” to “Bombay”.

Most of the Chrome extensions are boring, packaged up RSS feeds or utilities. But there’s something more exciting that can be done here. I’ll keep playing.

I tweeted earlier today: “Thinking of my pimped web-browser as my go-to weapon in the guerilla war against propaganda, bad journalism and general shiftiness.”

Yes, that’s it, sort of.